The present invention relates to a portable tape printing device for printing characters/letters on a tape-form recording medium.
Conventionally, various portable tape printing devices are proposed. An example of the portable tape printing device is configured to have a body in which a tape cassette holding a tape-form recording medium (hereinafter simply referred to as a tape) is accommodated. A platen roller driven by a driving motor powered by batteries is provided in the device. The tape is printed by a printing mechanism and discharged from the device.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,758,980 discloses such a tape printing device. According to the disclosure of the publication, a control circuit board and the tape cassette are arranged inside a case of the tape printing device such that they substantially overlap in the vertical direction, and a cutout portion is formed at one end of the control circuit board in a longitudinal direction thereof. The driving motor is placed in a space defined between the control circuit board and the tape cassette at the cutout portion. Further, a power supply circuit and multiple batteries (e.g., six batteries) are disposed in the case on the opposite side of the driving motor, with the batteries arranged in parallel within a battery holder.
In the above-mentioned arrangement, it is not necessary to form a space, for locating the driving motor, behind the control board and between the tape cassette and the battery holder. With this arrangement, it becomes unnecessary to form the control circuit board to be elongated or the case to be enlarged, and the tape printing device can be formed short and compact. Further, when the driving motor is disposed on one side of a wide portion of the case in the longitudinal direction thereof and the battery holder is formed on the other side, the driving motor and the batteries, both of which are heavy weight parts, are disposed on both sides of the case. As a result, the tape printing device becomes balanced when a person take it in hand for input operation. Thus, the operability of the tape printing device is improved.
Further, by providing a liquid crystal display (LCD) on a wide surface of the control circuit board at a location nearer to a short side thereof, and locating the cutout portion, at which the driving motor is to be disposed, beside the LCD, the size of the control board in the longitudinal direction can be reduced, resulting in shorter size of the case of the tape printing device in the longitudinal direction. Thus, the whole tape printing device can be made compact.
In the conventional tape printing device described above, the width of the case of the device is relatively wide since the batteries are arranged in parallel with the width direction of the device body, and hence the portion gripped by a hand is also wide, which makes it difficult to hold the device body with one hand. Further, the wide gripping portion of the device body makes it difficult to operate keys such as character input keys by the same hand that holds the tape printing device. That is, in such a device, it is necessary to press the character input keys, for example, by the right hand while holding the tape printing device with the left hand, resulting in bad operability.